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Trout in Papers
Take half a dozen trout of one-fourth pound each in weight, and stuff them with fish forcemeat. Oil as many pieces of paper as there are fish, place a slice of salt pork on either end of each piece, lay a trout on top, sprinkle over a little salt and pepper, fold the paper and tie it securely with a string. Cook in a baking-dish in a moderate oven for twenty minutes or so, and serve them in their envelopes, after removing the strings, with any sauce desired in a sauceboat.
Trout, Venetian Style Scale and clean a large trout, wash and dry it well, score it across the back and insert in the openings some butter highly seasoned with minced basil, lemon thyme, chives, and parsley. Put the trout in a dish, pour over salad oil to cover it, and let it remain for half an hour; then remove it, sprinkle over sifted breadcrumbs stirred in with a small quantity of chopped herbs, place it on a gridiron over a clear fire, and broil it for fifteen minutes or so, or until it is done. Place it on a dish and serve with orange sauce in a sauceboat.
Two trout preparations run together in the original: one baked in oiled paper parcels, one scored, marinated and grilled. Both assume small whole fish and a cook who can judge doneness by eye.
- The paperUse parchment, not waxed paper and certainly not printed paper. Cut a heart or oval roughly twice the length of the fish, brush it with oil as directed, and fold the edges over in a series of overlapping pleats; the string is optional if the crimp is tight.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F. Quarter-pound trout in a sealed parcel take about the twenty minutes the recipe allows, until the flesh at the thickest point flakes and reads 145F. The parcels may puff as steam builds inside them.
- Fish forcemeatA period forcemeat means white fish flesh pounded with a bread or flour panada, egg and cream, seasoned and worked smooth. A food processor does the pounding: roughly 8 oz of pike, sole or whiting to 1 egg white and 1/2 cup cream, chilled throughout, is enough for six small trout.
- Salt porkThe two slices at either end lift the fish off the paper and baste it as they render. Blanch the pork a minute in boiling water first if it is very salty, or substitute thin unsmoked bacon. Season the trout lightly, since the pork is already salty.
- Serving in the envelopeCut the parcels open at the table so the aroma is not lost in the kitchen. Six quarter-pound trout serve six as a first course or three to four as a main.
- The Venetian marinade'salad oil' in this period usually meant olive oil, though cottonseed and other refined oils were also sold under that name. Half an hour is enough; a longer soak leaves the fish too slick for the crumbs to hold.
- Gridiron over a clear fireA clear fire means coals with no flame and no smoke. A charcoal grill with a well-oiled grate is the closest equivalent; an overhead broiler at high heat, fish about 4 inches from the element, also works. Turn once. Fifteen minutes suits a fish of about 1 1/2 lb.
- Herbs and orange sauceLemon thyme is worth seeking out, but common thyme with a strip of lemon zest stands in. The orange sauce is not specified; the likeliest reading is a bitter-orange sauce of the bigarade type -- Seville juice, or ordinary orange juice sharpened with lemon, reduced with stock and mounted with butter.
Cooking en papillote was a standard French restaurant technique long before Oscar Tschirky compiled this book in 1896, and a fish sealed in paper holds its heat and its moisture between kitchen and dining room, arriving at the table making a small piece of theatre when the parcel is slit. Trout was a fashionable fish in American hotel dining of the period, brook trout especially, and it appears often on menus of the 1890s; improvements in refrigerated transport had widened the supply of fish from inland waters. The "Venetian style" label is looser than it sounds. Nineteenth-century kitchens attached city and regional names to garnishes and sauces with only occasional regard for the place itself, and here it appears to signal the herb butter and the orange sauce rather than any documented Venetian practice.